Author: Rita Garner

Today I wanted to talk to you about the method that I use to grow to be successful developer step by step. It doesn’t matter where you came from, we all come from different walks of life. You may be an IT guy, you may own a computer repair company nearby. Or you may not be in tech at all. Regardless of the case, becoming a developer is a great path that can be pursued by virtually anyone.

That is why for me everything is based on the following steps:

Discover yourself

First, you have to know yourself before you know what the next steps are going to be. Take a journey of self-knowledge, listen to yourself, discover what you like, how you want your life to be, what makes you happy and what does not.

Once you have enough information about yourself (I have to tell you that you never know each other entirely), you can now take the next step

Define Your Future And Create A Path There

Your specialization is going to be the vehicle. Now we need to know where it takes us. Imagine how you want your life to be 3-5 years from now: where do you want to live, with whom, how do you want your days to be, how your work … is The more details you can give much better.

Design Patterns

Philosophy Of Life

Good Programmer

Learn Everything You Need To Know

Through articles, talks, courses, books, mentors … Training will be essential, and if you decide to do it on your own, you will surely lose a lot of time lurching. My life has changed drastically since I decided to put myself in the hands of the best when I want to learn something new.

Share Your Knowledge

Try to convert helping others in your philosophy of life. Now that you are an expert in your specialty tell the world by all possible means: articles, blogs, talks, books …

As a gift, you will also become a benchmark in your sector, which will open many professional doors. But, above all, you will meet many interesting people with the same interests as you, which will help you as a catapult to want to continue being better and better.

For me the blog is the perfect weapon of personal branding, and where you can create more lasting relationships with the people you want to help.

Become A Good Professional

It is not enough to be right in your material. In parallel, you need to acquire the general knowledge that makes up a good programmer. Little by little you will begin to master concepts such as clean, SOLID, design patterns, architectures, testing … All this will make you be much better professional, and that big company put their eyes on you.

Or maybe you want to create your own company or work as a freelancer. Then you will be many steps ahead of the competition: with a specialization, an influential blog and a series of people who need you to solve their problems.

Today, an ‘app’ can solve almost any problem that arises in everyday life, from counting the steps, collecting exciting information or controlling bank accounts, among a myriad of options.

This technological explosion is generating opportunities in many fields, especially in developing mobile application. Three years ago, the European Commission predicted that, in 2018, the community sector of the development of ‘apps’ could generate 63,000 million euros and employ more than 4.8 million workers, of which at least 2.7 million would be developers of ‘apps.’ To this day, that threshold seems already exceeded.

In Europe, the Scandinavian countries and Germany are the leaders of the ‘app’ sector, with companies such as Rovio or King. However, the development of applications is also gaining strength in Spain, so that in the last five years the demand for application developers in the Spanish labor market has multiplied by 17, according to Infojobs.

Training At All Levels

Given the need for professionals to cover these profiles, there are several educational itineraries to be trained as an application developer. At present, in Spain, there are specific courses, vocational training formative cycles, university degrees and master’s degrees that, with their different programs and durations, offer the necessary knowledge to join a growing sector.

“Given that it is a very demanded profile at the moment, there are many studies that one can do to become a developer of ‘apps,’” says Daniel Lopez, coordinator of the Higher Level Training Cycle in ‘Development of Multiplatform Applications’ at the University Center U-tad. “There are courses of a few months that we think are too short to understand sufficiently well the complex technologies that are needed to develop ‘apps.’”

Due to his experience, Lopez believes that “an intensive two-year training course in which the student learns to use the technologies necessary to develop applications of different natures for a wide variety of platforms” is essential. Companies, says the U-tad coordinator, often criticize that many students are not used to developing applications for iOS platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) and spend months until they are productive. To alleviate this lack says Lopez, “the Cycle in ‘Development of Multiplatform Applications’ of U-tad is one of the few in Spain that trains students in the development of ‘apps’ for iOS and Android operating systems.”…

In addition to courses and training cycles, there are also degrees, such as the one taught by Celeste Campo, full professor in the Department of Telematics Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid. “A university degree in Telematics Engineering provides an overview,” with knowledge of “security, databases and operating systems, which are covered in the degree in Telematics Engineering, as well as in other degrees in the field of Engineering Telecommunications and Computer Engineering.”

This overall vision, Campo emphasizes, is necessary in “a sector such as the development of mobile applications, in which the application usually has to interact with services in the cloud, exchanging information in formats defined for the web, through various technologies (LTE, Bluetooth, WiFi, NFC), interacting with objects around us, managing information in databases on the mobile itself, etc. “. Also, he considers that this broad perspective allows adapting to the rapid technological changes in this sector, which in less than a year generates new versions of operating systems and other technologies, “with radical changes in the way of programming them.”

In this way, opting for a training cycle in development of ‘apps’ can be a more immediate path to a job, although it is clear that the longer duration and program of a degree helps to receive complete training. However, both options are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In U-tad, in addition to the training cycle, an official degree in software engineering is offered, which “allows the student to deepen the development of ‘apps’ and other sectors highly demanded in the market such as virtual reality, the ‘ big data ‘ or cybersecurity,” Says Daniel Lopez. In this way, students expand “their training in mathematics, networks, databases, artificial intelligence and a long etcetera, which makes them highly specialized profiles and highly demanded by companies.”